Future of Social Media - What Comes After Facebook?

10:44 PM

I n case you have been on vacation for the past 6 months, you'll know that Facebook and Twitter are in a bit of trouble. I don't me...

In case you have been on vacation for the past 6 months, you'll know
that Facebook and Twitter are in a bit of trouble. I don't mean they are
about to go bankrupt or anything (they won't), but we're seeing a clear
trend of disapproval towards them.

In a recent consumer satisfaction report by ForeSee,
Twitter and Facebook scored well below what you would expect, averaging
62.5 out of 100 (that's well below the average of 74.2). In
comparison, Google+ scored 78, Google Search scored 82, Bing Scored 81,
Yahoo scored 78, Wikipedia 78, and the average score for newspapers was
73.

More
to the point, Facebook represents the largest drop of all the digital
brands measured. And while this report only measured consumer
satisfaction, we see the same trend in business satisfaction. Some
people call this social media fatigue, but there is a lot more to it
than that. In fact, there is no such thing as social media fatigue. We
are not tired of social, we are tired of all the things that get in the
way of being social.

We have the issue of control. When you
create a blog, you feel in control. It's your blog and you decide what
happens to it. You decide what service to use, how to use it, how to
design it, what features to include, and the overall structure. A blog
feels like an extension of yourself because you make all the decisions.

We
don't have that feeling on Facebook or Twitter. We feel like we are
just a guest playing around in their garden. We have no control. We can
decide what we post, but not how it is posted. We cannot decide how
things should look, we cannot even decide who should see it because of
EdgeRank.

At the same time, we have the constant violations of
privacy. One day, we find information we thought we could control is
suddenly made a part of something that we didn't agree to at all - like
when our name is used in relation to 3rd party products or brands. We
have issues with the design, in which we don't feel any continuity, not
to mention Facebook suddenly changing what email address people see.

For
brands it's not much better. Brands are being limited in so many ways,
that they often wonder why they embrace these social channels at all.
It's actually 'illegal' to ask fans to vote on two pictures and then
reward them with a prize. We can do this on our blogs, but we can't on
Facebook. Again, we're not allowed to be in control.

On top of
this, we are faced with design constraints. We're not allowed to include
promotional messages in our cover images. So, if you have a big event
on Saturday, we can't visually promote that in the best possible way.
Again, we're are not allowed to be in control. And while I personally
like the Facebook timeline design, it's not really that useful.

Then
we have another problem; the newsfeed. Posts without links are
presented with diminished emphasis when compared to posts that include a
photo. Here you get bigger pictures and bigger text than post with
links to a web shop, for example.

For developers it's even worse.
There is a continual movement to keep people within the confines of each
social channel instead of embracing the connected world. For instance,
Twitter is preventing tweets being cross-posted to LinkedIn. They are
also preventing 3rd party apps (like Instagram) being able to 'find
friends via Twitter', They are increasingly trying to keep people on
Twitter instead of being a platform from which we can connect.

All
of this, of course, is nothing when compared to the even bigger problem
causing social media fatigue. The problem of closed platforms.

Let me tell you a little story about email.

In
the early 1980s, email worked pretty much as social services do today.
Each email provider used their own proprietary protocols and systems,
and each system was unable to communicate with any other. The result was that you could only send emails to friends who were using the same system as you. This
of course was completely impractical. Soon, a number of third party
services appeared, which could be used to translate one email protocol
to any other, but in doing so you lost the original communication link. It was better than the closed systems before it, but it was hardly a usable solution.

So
email didn't take off because the process was simply too complicated.
It wasn't until every email provider finally decided on an open,
non-proprietary format, that email started to work and became the
massively popular communication mechanism that we know today.

Social
media is currently undergoing the very same process. When you sign-up
for Facebook, you cannot use it to communicate with people on any other
channel. There is no way, for instance, to have a communication via
Facebook Chat with a person using Twitter Direct Messages. Each
social platform, just like email of the past, is using their own server
protocols, their own API specifications, and their own authentication
models.

In order for you to communicate with your friends, you
are forced to setup separate accounts for each social service. You have
to setup an account on Facebook, on Twitter, on Google+, on Instagram,
on Path, on Foursquare, on Pinterest, etc. And not only do you have to
setup up separate accounts, you also have to manage separate channels of
communications.

Imagine if this was also how blogs worked.
Instead of just setting up one Wordpress blog, you would have to setup a
blog on each blog network. On Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad, Squarespace,
etc. Not only that, but all your readers would have to sign-up
as well. If a reader wanted to follow a Wordpress blog, he would have to
have a Wordpress account. And if he wanted to follow a Typepad blog, he
would have to signup for Typepad too.

This is how social media
works today. We, as publishers, are forced to setup our presence on each
platform, and so do our readers.

In resent years, several
startups have tried to solve this by creating third party tools that can
convert communication from one system to any other like Hootsuite,
Tweetdeck or Seesmic.

It's
far better than being forced to manually go to each service several
times per day, but it is still a terrible solution that doesn't really
get us anywhere. We still have to create separate accounts on each
service, and the communications within each service is still separated
from each other. Again, it's just like the early 3rd party email converters of the 1980s.

The future of social media

The question is then, what is the next step? What is the future of social media?
And the answer is painfully obvious because we have already seen it
happen with email. The future is when social becomes a protocol.

Many people think that the future of Facebook is alternatives like Diaspora,
or the many Twitter alternatives that are popping up, but no. Diaspora,
while much more open and flexible than Facebook, doesn't change the
problem. You still cannot communicate across services. You still cannot
tie it into everything, and you still have to ask people to create a
separate account for each social service.

And
it's the same with the many Twitter alternatives. We are not moving
forward and, as such, neither of these alternatives have any chances of
making a difference.

The future of Facebook is ...nothing. Meaning,
the future of social is not yet another destination. It's a
communication protocol, a standard way of connecting with each other.
There is no 'the next Facebook', because Facebook itself is like the
email systems of the past.

Let me give you a very simple example of the future of social media. Take this article. Is it social?No,
of course not. It's published on a website, and while I have added
sharing buttons to it, that's doesn't really make it social because you
don't actually share the article, or the communication within it. You
only share a link.

But what if I copy/pasted this article and instead posted it directly on Google+ or on Facebook, would it then be social?Well, yes...it would. Then it would be just like any other social post, tied into the social fabric of the social channels.

But wait-a-minute...that means that today we define social not as what we do, but where we do it. If we post an article on a website, we are not social. But if we post it on Facebook, we are. Why
can't we define a website as a social channel? Why do we think of
social media as a destination? Again, it's just how we used to think
about email. Isn't the act of posting something that others can connect, follow and communicate with what social is all about?

There
shouldn't be a difference between how social you are when posting
something on one channel versus posting it on another. Social media
today is still stuck in the old world of destinations.This is why
the real social revolution has only reached 2% of its real potential.
We haven't actually started being social yet ...

What will the social world be like in the future?

First
of all, social media won't be a destination. This has a number of huge
implications. For one, you will no longer have to sign-up for different
social channels, just so you can follow a brand or your friends. You
will be able to decide which tools or services benefit you the most.Today,
people and brands don't really have a choice which services they want
to use. If all your friends are using Facebook, you have to use Facebook
as well.

But what if you could follow your Facebook friends from
Google+? What if you didn't want to sign-up for Facebook at all, and
you happened to prefer another channel? That's social as a protocol.With
email, you don't have to sign-up for an Outlook account, just because
several of your friends happen to be using that. But you can still
communicate with them because email today isn't a destination. It's a
protocol.For brands, it's even more profound. Today, brands are
forced to publish their content on social channels, and in the process
are disconnecting it from their business. We see this, for instance with
the Facebook readers of the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian and many
others, including brands like ASOS, who have to operate two web shops,
one on Facebook and one on their website.

When social becomes a
protocol, brands can just use whatever platform that fits their business
model the most. It would be just as easy to follow a brand on a
website, as it is to follow it on Facebook.And I'm not talking
about cross-posting or linking the way we see it today. That's
destination thinking. I'm talking about social as a protocol, where the
content comes to you, on whatever channel you prefer to use. If you prefer to use Google+, you can read the full article on Google+. Here is one concept made by Michelle Marie, in which you are following the New York Times directly from within Google+

It's
the full article. It's not republished. It's the original article, from
the source. It's included in your stream but you are not following
NYTimes on Google+, you are following the website of NYTimes inside
Google+.More to the point, if you read the article over at
Google+, the interaction is made a part of the original content. Meaning
your comments and likes, +1s, or hearts would also show up on any other
channel. When social becomes a protocol, the interaction and
communication would be linked to the content itself, rather than the
platform.

You might say, this is never going to happen. But it will. It
happened with email, which was first defined as a destination, then a
destination + connectors, then as a standard protocol. But it doesn't
stop here...

It also happened with TV. In the early days, TV shows
had to be made for each specific type of TV, just like social posts
have to be made for each social channel. But today, TV broadcasts are a
protocol, and it doesn't matter what type of TV you happen to own.

It happened with radio and the telegraph, and even satellite communication. It
happened with our lightbulbs, electric outlets, coffee machines,
kitchen stoves, washing machines, the rims on our cars, and the windows
and doors in our houses. It happened with soda cans, shipping
containers, cardboard boxes. It happened with our clothes, the zipper
and buttons. It happened with your speakers and audio file formats. It
happened with our cameras, video recorders and batteries. It happened
with our food, our milk cartons and honey jars.

In fact, it
happened with pretty much every single thing we have ever known. Each
one started life as an object controlled only by the company who made
it, then extended by third parties to allow it to work across
manufacturers, and finally to becoming a standard or a protocol that
disconnected the object from the destination.

The social shift is
just the natural evolution of how things happen. Not only that, but all
the trends are pointing in the same direction. The dissatisfaction we
see with social media today, is the result of the limitations of the
actual destinations.We don't have social media fatigue. We have social destination fatigue.

What happens now?

So
what does this mean for our current social media channels? Well, first
of all, this social 'shift' from destination to protocol is going to
take a while. The current social world is very entrenched in the
traditional form of social. So, who's going to feel the pinch first?

Twitter

Twitter
is probably the first one to feel the pressure. It's format, limited to
140 characters, means that it cannot be a connection by itself, it can
only be the facilitator of a connection. Twitter's very existence
is based upon being something that connects people between destination.
And once those destinations are replaced, a big part of Twitter's role
evaporates. There is, however, one interesting aspect of Twitter
and its social future. Twitter Cards. The idea is that a tweet is not
just a tweet anymore, now a tweet is accompanied with the actual post
itself (or a summary of it).

The concept of Twitter cards is very interesting, because it illustrates a glimmer of the future of what social will be about.

The
problem, of course, is that Twitter isn't doing this for the sake of
social as a protocol. They are doing it to force you to use Twitter as a
destination. As such, Twitter is actually moving in the wrong
direction. They are trying to discourage you from connecting
directly with the source, by republishing your content within a tweet.
The concept is interesting, but the reasoning behind it isn't. Twitter
will not go away anytime soon, but without the destinations, their
future will be a social niche. Great for sharing quick things you want
people to see, but not really a part of the larger social revolution.

Facebook

Facebook
has even bigger problems because everything it does is designed to
establish Facebook as the one and only destination for social media. They
are trying to find a way for you to only use Facebook. As such, their
entire business model is based on the opposite of what the social
revolution is about.

Forcing brands to create specialized brand
pages and getting newspapers and web shops to create Facebook apps,
these are all tools to get you to use Facebook as a destination. The
features and functionality, and the overall social effect, is all very
impressive, but it doesn't change the fact that Facebook is trying to
prevent us from turning social into a protocol.In many ways,
Facebook is like Apple. Why, for instance, can't you buy iBooks on your
Android phone? Surely there is a market for that? The reason is simple.
Apple's iBookstore does not exist to sell books, it exists to establish
iOS as a destination.

It's the same with most Facebook features.
They are not designed to help the social world. They are designed to
establish Facebook as a destination. There is, however, one
glimmer of hope for Facebook. We see it with Facebook and Spotify. The
way social works between those two destinations is almost like social as
a protocol. Almost, because while you can see everything you do on
Spotify within Facebook, and even bring your friend connections back to
Spotify, the actual communication is very one sided. Facebook is still
the only destination.

Google+

Google+
is in many ways also a destination, especially with its lack of a
two-way API and outside tools. In that regard, Google+ is just as bad as
Facebook, in trying to use social to force people to become part of
that connection. Just as all other social channels, you need to be on Google+ to take part in it. With
that said, Google+ is actually the closest thing we have to the future
of social as a protocol. While Google+ itself is a destination like all
the others, Google+ as a service is not. For example, it's integrated
into Gmail and Google Calendar and 'Hangout on Air' is integrated into
YouTube.

The future of social for Google is looking very
promising. It's already really close within its own services. It won't
be long until YouTube and Google+ become part of the same social
protocol. When you upload a video to YouTube, it will also automatically
become part of your Google+ stream. When you post a comment on Google+,
it won't be long until that comment is made part of YouTube as well -
and vice versa.But it doesn't stop there. Think about Blogger
combined with Google+. Soon we will be able to create a blog on
Blogger, and then, whenever we post a new article, it will be posted on
Google+ as well. Not the link, but the real article.

Then, when
you comment on Google+, it will be made part of the article on Blogger
and vice versa. As an individual, you are then free to decide how you
want to follow it. You can follow it on the blog or on Google+. You
decide where and how your want to engage with it. Unlike Facebook
(and Twitter), Google has the capabilities to expand beyond its social
network. They have the tools, the sites, and the services, to turn
social into a protocol.Of course, it would still be limited to
Google, and still be a destination. But we already use YouTube videos
across channels and sites. If that happens with Google+, then we are
looking at an early framework for social as protocol.

Nothing comes after Facebook.

As
I started out saying. The future of Facebook is...nothing because we
have reached the end of social media as a thing, a place and a
destination. The future of social media is to be a protocol. There will not be another Facebook. There will not be another Twitter, and there will not even be another Google+.

That
doesn't mean there isn't a future for social tools, there is! We are at
2% of the real social revolution, and the social space is looking very
exciting. But it's a different type of social. Pinterest is a
social destination. Foursquare is a social destination, Path is a social
destination...and they are all defining social as a 'thing'.

But
think of the Google+ vs Blogger example, where the social element is
not a destination at all, but a protocol that binds everything together.
What tools could you add to that? How could you extend it? How could
you augment it? How could you compete with it?The real social shift is just about to start!